Clients are not judging Manulife simply against other Canadian life insurance companies, says Manulife’s Canadian CEO Mike Doughty.

Today, customers are comparing their experience dealing with the insurance giant against the best customer service providers in any industry, he says.

Doughty was in Halifax Tuesday to meet with some of the more than 1,000 employees Manulife has working in its Halifax hub on Joseph Howe Drive.

An international company, Manulife Financial is headquartered in Waterloo, Ont., with extensive operations across Canada, but with important business in the United States and a fast growing arm in Asia.

In 2004, Manulife expanded its U.S. operations by acquiring Boston-based John Hancock insurance company. As an offshoot of that acquisition, it acquired Hancock’s Canadian subsidiary Maritime Life, based in Halifax.

Doughty says the numbers of employees in Halifax are continuing to grow. Last October the company signed a payroll rebate agreement with Nova Scotia Business Inc. as an incentive to create more jobs. Under the agreement with NSBI, it will create another 600 jobs in the province over the next five years.

Based on the maximum growth forecast, NSBI estimated at the time of the announcement that Manulife could spend a total of $139.8 million in salaries.

The client service aspect of Manulife’s business is increasingly important to the company, Doughty told me in an interview Tuesday. The Halifax operation has lawyers, actuaries and tech professionals to provide client support in the new digital age but the Halifax hub has been primarily focused on customer service.

Doughty says Manulife surveys its employees on a regular basis and the Halifax contingent comes out tops in how they feel about the company and the customer.

“We’re in the midst of training up about 125 customer experience people, that’s primarily what we’re trying to do.”

The term “customer experience” is important, he says because Manulife wants its staff not to think of themselves as operations or a contact centre, the company now is trying to providing customers with a positive experience every time they interact with Manulife.

“In a way its terminology but its more than that because there is a meaning behind it,” he says.

Rather than requiring its applicants for jobs at Manulife to come already prepared with the skills required to do the work, the company CEO says Manulife is eager to find talented people where it can find them and provide them with the necessary skills.

The Halifax office is now being leveraged, he says, to support some of the company’s global operations. “We have underwriting support for our John Hancock Life Insurance being done out of this location. We now have people supporting the U.S. group retirement business out of this location. So, we really view it as an opportunity to, over time, to grow the staff here.”

Manulife has good staff retention in Halifax, Doughty says, and it has a very highly educated, good workforce so he doesn’t think there is any reason why the company couldn’t build its business in Nova Scotia.

Although Manulife is a massive insurance company, it has other facets including Manulife Bank, which other insurance companies don’t have.

And, he says, technology is helping to drive the big changes happening, not just in Manulife, but both most other companies.

But the addition of technology is not a bad thing for clients, especially if it helps to speed the process of dealing with an insurance company. Doughty says the company is already investing in and using artificial intelligence to underwrite basic insurance policies.